


champagne, cocaine, gasoline

by alexanger



Series: a hell of a feeling [1]
Category: Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide Attempt, except not really it's more. being on the edge of doing it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-28
Updated: 2016-11-28
Packaged: 2018-09-02 19:40:37
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,127
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8680903
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alexanger/pseuds/alexanger
Summary: James Madison is tired of being sick.





	

**Author's Note:**

> content warning for in-depth talk of suicidal thoughts and plans. keep yourself safe.

James tips the pills out of his weekly organizers, all four of them, onto his bedspread. It’s rumpled and stained but he can see the pills just fine - and those he can’t see, he can feel, with hesitant fingertips that quiver just a little. Whether they quiver with nerves or with the sickness, it’s hard to say.

He’s been good about his anxiety lately. Well, not so much good as thrifty. He’s hoarded his xanax carefully and filled his prescriptions a little early for the past six months, and all the times he chose not to take it have lead to a pill bottle packed with the tiny white tablets. There isn’t nearly enough to do any significant damage. At least, not by itself.

But he has his mood levellers, and he’s been ducking doses of that too; and there’s the suppressant medication that keeps his immune system from turning on itself, and he hasn’t been ducking any doses of that, but he’s just filled a new prescription. Six months’ worth of tablets.

And then there’s the antihistamine, the one that knocks him silly and fucks him up, and with that and everything else, and his pain medication, and his sleeping medication -

It should be enough.

He counts each tablet, records the dosage of each pill, multiplies the numbers, googles overdose amounts. His fingers grasp at each tiny pill like pebbles on a beach. He wonders if it will be like drowning. 

(That’s what the antihistamine is for - he figures it’ll put him under and all the pain will happen while he’s asleep - but fuck it, what does he know? He isn’t a doctor. He’s barely a human being.)

In the sickly half-light of his bedside lamp, James looks like a wreck. His skin is ashy, stretched taut like overstrained canvas over the jagged peaks of his cheekbones. There’s something reminiscent of charcoal in his skin, as though, if you were to touch it, it would would be dry and lifeless beneath your hands, leave powdery streaks between the ridges of your fingerprints.

He is ill, and so, so tired of being ill. It’s hard enough to know your body has decided to fight against you, harder still to not even have your own brain on your side. Everything in his life is accomplished through a constant haze of exhaustion and pain and it’s always too much. And up until now, he’s managed; but there comes a time, he tells himself, that you stop living and start just … existing. It’s a full time job of just existing, and all the happiness is gone.

So: pills. Pills, and a bottle of champagne to swallow them with, because he can’t drink alcohol any more either and he hasn’t had a bottle of champagne in a couple of years and he misses it. His body can’t revolt if it’s only so much decomposing meat instead of living organs and pumping blood. It will be nice, he thinks, to have his last drink on earth be champagne.

It’s in the fridge, chilling. Cold champagne, a warm bed, and handfuls of pills. An eventful Friday night.

There’s silence, save for the occasional car rushing by down the road. James lives in a quiet building on a quiet street, and on nights like this it’s easy to forget there’s an entire world outside his bedroom door. He’s spent far too many nights like this, lying alone with his thoughts because the sound of television hurts too much and reading is too difficult for his eyes to manage and no one wants to be friends with the sick guy if it means having to put up with him when he’s feeling unwell, which is … literally all the time. It’s lonely, being this sick. The loneliness is more tiring than anything else.

The note is written, and he leans back against his headboard to draft a scheduled text.  _ If you’re getting this, I’m not alive anymore, _ he types, and then he stops. A moment of thought, and then he adds,  _ it isn’t your fault. Nothing you could have done. I’m just so tired, Th _

His phone starts ringing. It startles him, and it takes a moment of mindful breathing to quiet his heart. James inhales deep through his nose, taps his screen, puts the phone to his ear, and says, “hey.”

“Jemmy jam,” Thomas says in his ear. “Jambourine. -”

“Do you have to do this every time we talk?” James asks, but he can’t help grinning.

“I can hear you smiling. Yes, I do, Jarmalade.”

“That one’s a little far, TJ.”

“Jementine,” Thomas says, very clearly trying not to laugh. “Jello.”

“Fuck you.”

“Gladly. What’s up? How’s it going?”

James looks at the piles of pills on his bedspread, and says, “nothing much. Slow night. You know how it goes for me. What’s up with you?”

“Thank God you asked, I thought you were gonna try and tell me a story or something. It’s Thomas time -”

“When is it ever not Thomas time?” he asks.

“Hush, Jemmington. So I got this date, right, with this girl -”

“Did you have to bribe her?”

“No, I fucking asked, like a human being. And I’m on my way with her to the movie -”

“Listen,” James says, “why would you take a girl to a movie? You don’t get to talk.”

“Exactly. So if she’s boring, I don’t have to sit through her trying to talk to me. We’re walking to the theatre, and I trip on the sidewalk -”

“Did you break your face?”

Thomas laughs. “You’d be heartbroken if I did, wouldn’t you? No, but I ripped my jeans -”

“- therefore ruining your entire life -”

“- and she looks at me and starts laughing, so I was like, well, fuck this date, I’ll never get over the embarrassment -”

“You’re a nerd,” James says, and then he drifts. It doesn’t matter what Thomas is saying; there’s always the same pattern to his words, a cadence he knows like his own heartbeat, and he knows exactly when to say “mmhm” and “no kidding” and “shit, really?” He sinks down into his bed, careful not to send any of the tablets tumbling to the floor, which is piled with a month’s worth of dirty laundry and empty food wrappers.

The despair creeps away a little whenever Thomas calls. Though it isn’t as though Thomas would ever feel the same depth of love for him - Thomas is tall and gorgeous and conceited, and he has an easy smile and ravenous eyes. There’s a deep dissatisfaction in him that James knows he could never fill. And above all, he’s - well, he’s perfect, whole, complete, a real person with a real life ahead of him. What could James possibly offer him? Or anyone, for that matter?

That isn’t why - the pills -

It’s the exhaustion. The exhaustion is everything, the root of all of it, why he can’t bear to go on and why he couldn’t ever tell Thomas anything aside from  _ you’re my best friend  _ and  _ I miss you, you’re so far away now. _

Thomas is talking, which is the same as usual, but the cadence has changed. “Jeetah,” he’s saying. “Jester. Jocular. Jemolantern. Jerm. Jim jam slam.”

“What,” says James, sleepy, like his tongue is numb. 

“You stopped answering, buddy. You okay?”

“Yeah,” James lies. “Golden. I’m great. How are you?”

“You asked that already, bud. You sure you’re okay?”

“Yep.”

“Because,” says Thomas, “if you weren’t, I’d wanna know. No judgement. I care about you. You know that, right?”

“I know,” James says.

“I love you, man.”

James pauses. “I love you too,” he says, and his heart leaps into his throat, and he wonders if Thomas knows exactly how much he means those words.

Thomas huffs a little. Then he’s back into his story and James is drifting again.

_ Jeetah, _ he thinks, and he sticks his tongue out, humming through a pause in Thomas’s story.  _ That barely even works. _

There are certain things he’ll miss, if there’s enough of him left after he dies to miss anything. Thomas’s ludicrous nicknames; the taste of peppermint, the way it feels to chew a leaf snipped from the plant on his windowsill; the scent of the coconut oil Thomas uses in his hair. 

James thinks of the bubbles in the champagne, the macabre indulgence of toasting his own death. He thinks about pouring his champagne into a mug and downing most of it until there’s just enough left to sip, to savour, to ride in waves into the darkness. He thinks of Thomas’s voice lulling him.

“You should come up and visit for a while,” Thomas says.

“Can’t,” James tells him. “I can’t do planes. Need to be near my doctor. The stress -”

“I understand, buddy.”

If his math is right, he has enough pills to do it, and the champagne will help. There’s more than enough to shut down his organs, switch off his brain. He thinks about his body lying in bed, growing cold and stiff, while his soul rises out into the air and dissipates. If he has one. It’s debatable at this point.

What is there in a soul, he wonders? Does it live in his lungs and hiss out with his final breath? Or is it in his spine, the tingles he gets when he hears Thomas say his name? Is it in his fingertips? There’s something almost religious about the way he fondles the pills in his lap.

He gets up to fetch the bottle, which  _ must  _ be cold by now. The bubbles are what he really wants. He likes the concept of gas trapped in liquid rising to the surface to tingle over his tongue. Are the bubbles the spirit of the champagne? 

Spirits in spirits, he thinks, and he breathes out a little harder through his nose, as close to laughter as he’s been in weeks. It feels good.

“Thomas,” he hears his mouth say, “I need help.”

Thomas makes a soft, cracked noise. “I know,” he says.

“I’m scared, and things aren’t getting better.”

“I know.” A pause. “Are you planning to do anything to yourself?”

“Yeah,” James says. No point in lying. His feet lead him to the fridge; he pulls it open and stares at the bottle of Moet & Chandon. Foolish, to spend that kind of money - but then, what was he planning to spend it on after he was dead?

“Jemmy - I’m not upset at you. You know that, right?”

“Yeah.”

“So I’ll come down there, then, if you can’t come up here. I just need you to get through the night without me. I’ll stay with you -”

“My apartment’s a dump.”

“I’ll help clean it. Nothing is impossible, right? Not if I’m helping you through it.”

James feels himself tear up. “Right.” No bubbles, then, on his tongue, spreading slowly, tingling, spirits passing over his taste buds. Thomas will drink it. James wonders if he can talk about the spirits, the bubbles, without sounding foolish.

“Thomas,” he says. “The bubbles in champagne -”

“What about them?”

And he feels giddy, suddenly. No rush to tell Thomas anything - there’s time. “Nothing,” he says.

“Okay. I’m booking a flight. Be there in the morning.”

“What about work?”

“Compassionate leave. I’ll take time off. You hang on til the morning, okay?”

“Yeah.”

“You want me to stay on the phone with you?”

He’s bone tired and he wants to sleep. “No,” he says, pushing the fridge closed with his foot.

“Okay. Jamie, you know I love you, right? Most important person in my life. I don’t know what I’d do without you. So hold on for me, just until the morning, and then we’ll make sure that you’re holding on for you. Okay?”

“Yeah,” James says. “Love you too. Night, TJ.”

“Night, Jamie. See you soon.”

He hangs up, shoves his phone in his pocket, and walks back into his room. For a moment, he pauses, staring at the pills.

It’s not too late to do it anyway.

Then he kneels by the bed and carefully sorts the pills back into his organizer and into their proper bottles. He tucks the bottles into his medicine cabinet and stacks the organizers on his nightstand, and then he fills his water bottle and gets into bed.

The text draft is still open on his screen when he unlocks his phone. He reads it over twice, then deletes the message, and instead he types,  _ thank you, TJ. I can’t wait to see you again. _

And as he dozes off, he feels his phone buzz, and he’s awake enough to read through bleary eyes,  _ Can’t wait to see you either. Thank you. _

And then sleep claims him, and he drifts away to the phantom sensation of bubbles washing over his tongue.

**Author's Note:**

> need space to talk? come chat to me on [tumblr](http://alexangery.tumblr.com). ♥


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